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Martha Valentine has had first-hand combat experience with older brothers since the 1980’s. The bestselliing Mumtastic! and Dadtastic! (9781906032616, 9781906032821) were her first books.

Boris Vallejo is one of the world’s top fantasy artists, best known as the visual creator of Conan the Barbarian. His fantasy art books include ‘Enchantment’, ‘Ladies: Fantasy Art Techniques’ and ‘The Boris Vallejo Portfolio’, and he has also published two collections of his photographic work, ‘Bodies and Hindsight’.

Anna Venturi, born in Milan, runs Venturi’s Table, the UK’s first corporate cookery centre, with her daughter Letizia. In just three years the centre has helped over 7,000 business professionals bond through cooking together. She has been featured as an Italian cookery expert in the Telegraph Magazine, Observer Food Monthly, Waitrose Food Illustrated, Taste Italia, olive, Good Housekeeping and Italian Marie Claire, among others.

Jack Vettriano is entirely self-taught. A Scotsman of Italian descent, he left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer working down the Fife coalfields. For his twenty-first birthday a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints and from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint. His first solo exhibition in Edinburgh was a sell-out and since then he has had solo exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. Over the last twenty years, interest in Vettriano’s work has grown consistently. Vettriano’s best known painting, The Singing Butler, was sold at Sotheby’s for close to £750,000. He was awarded an OBE for Services to the Visual Arts. In 2013, a major twenty year Retrospective exhibition of Vettriano’s work was staged at Kelvingrove art Gallery and Musuem in Glasgow. He lives in Edinburgh.